Anybody got a decent tutorial or know of one that can give me an idea of how to model a shirt collar or coat lapel? I don't know why, but they look deceptively easy and I can never get the right.

Arrimus 3D has a very nice shirt modeling tutorial which makes some easy work of the collar area and happens to be exactly the same technique I would use personally. You will see that this tutorial is for 3dsmax, but do not be discouraged to watch it. The collar area is just a matter of some very simple and rudimentary polygon extrusion techniques which you can translate over to Blender workflow without any confusion. Watch how he does it at the 10:35 point of the video, and I'm sure you can get the same or similar results in Blender.

LuxXeon posted at 7:46PM Thu, 04 January 2018 - #4321610

Arrimus 3D has a very nice shirt modeling tutorial which makes some easy work of the collar area and happens to be exactly the same technique I would use personally. You will see that this tutorial is for 3dsmax, but do not be discouraged to watch it. The collar area is just a matter of some very simple and rudimentary polygon extrusion techniques which you can translate over to Blender workflow without any confusion. Watch how he does it at the 10:35 point of the video, and I'm sure you can get the same or similar results in Blender.

Thanks, LuxXeon, I'll give it a watch now.

All nice and well done, but that's how you end up with unwelded pockets, flaps and buttons. Better to extrude those from the base mesh and keep all parts properly welded..

Not necessarily true at all, @tonyvilters. Depending on your purposes, and the level or detail you're after, there's no harm in modeling something as it is in the real world, which in this case, would mean separate geometry [pieces of cloth] for pockets etc. It does mean you have to be aware that they are separate pieces when/if you rig the model, and work with them as such. If you're baking the mesh down to a normal map down to be used on another mesh, then separate geometry is likely the "better" way to do it, as it'll save time trying to model everything uni-mesh as well as giving you a more pronounced edge than you'd get otherwise which should bake better, if you cage is right.

Your buttons should absolutely almost always be separate geometry as they're not only a different piece in the real world, they're a wholly different material as well [unless, again, you're baking to a normal map for a use that doesn't require that level of physical detail, even then they should be a separate piece on the high poly mesh].

Tja, and sooner or later, some end customer is going to use this in the fitting room, or in the cloth room and then wonder why pieces keep falling off, intersecting, not shrinking properly or whatever and then criticise the software.

Poser clothing has to have clear mat zones, be properly welded and vertex grouped.

Diffuse, normal, or other maps/txtures have absolutely nothing to do with the issue here.

That seems a very specific use-case rather than the general use purposes I was speaking of; in your example non-manifold geometry may be a problem, I've never worked with either. For uses other than what you've mentioned, unimesh vs multiple pieces may not matter as much or at all. In the example I used of baking to normal maps; generally speaking you're likely to be baking your high-poly multi-piece geometry to a lower poly unimesh model if you were modeling it for that purpose, so I don't think you can discount "normal maps" even if the end use may by fitting room so I don't feel you can discount that either.

I feel you may only looking at this with a very a narrow view of uses for something like this, and trying define "better" for all cases using solely that view, when it may not be the case.